TheBigFatJ on 29 July 2007
Some information on production from Nintendo as of late April:
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/9533.cfm
"For the first three months of this year we have been producing one million hardware units per month. We are increasing the manufacturing capacity and forecast to ship 14 million in this fiscal year to our distributors and retail customers globally," the spokesperson said.
Let's look at what this quote really tell us. It tell us that they've had about 1 million units per month January through March. Secondly, it tell us that they're increasing production so they can meet 14 million units in the 12 months following (April '07 through March '08). This suggests they will average less than 1.2 million per month. However, we don't know how exactly that would pan out -- would they continue producing 1 million per month and significantly increase their production to 1.5 million? This is far more likely than increasing production by 200k/units per month for business reasons, so chances are they were looking at increasing production quite a ways down the road.
More recently, Nintendo changed their projection to 16.5 million units in the same period. There are a few questions:
(1) Was Nintendo already planning to have sufficient capacity for that and are they simply surprised by the demand again? I'd say this is unlikely given the static and high nature of the demand.
(2) Did Nintendo plan on increasing production twice, have they already increased production and are they planning on doing so again?
(3) Did Nintendo determine or discover that they could increase production more than they anticipated when they increase production (assuming they haven't already), or did they possibly decide to be more aggressive with their upcoming production increase?
Personally, I believe #3 is the most likely case. Nintendo is likely trying to increase production. We don't really know what's happening behind the scenes, and we don't know how difficult it really is to increase production of an entire console.
Sony and Microsoft, who haven't been producing as many units of either the PS3 or the 360 as Nintendo has of the Wii, were both stunted by individual component production issues. This is *much* easier to resolve than entire product production and it still took them months. And both of them still missed their first fiscal year manufacturing goals.
